Thanks to everyone who replied. The winning response goes to Jan :)
I've included here because it's a very neat little trick to know and
worth squirreling away. As he (and Bob Blair) suspected, the in-tree
driver does not support the chip which I verified with Jan's suggestion.
I've loaded the latest driver from the realtek site and it works just
fine.
Thanks again. Happy holidays to all.
Ken
Jan Iven wrote:
Drivers evolve and add support for new devices. Your sysrescuecd simply
might have a newer version of the driver. Since this is an in-tree
driver, the fact that you cannot install SL45 over it is a good
indication that it won't be useful later either (unless your
installation puts an updated kernel on the disk that now has an updated
driver).
To verify:
try "lspci", identify your network card slot (e.g. '01:0d.0'). Run
"lspci -vvn -s 01:0d.0". This gives the PCI Id in numeric form (01:0d.0
Class 0280: MAJOR MINOR..)
Then run "modinfo r8169". This will give a list of PCI IDs (major and
minor ID concatenated into one big hex number) this driver feels
responsible for. If your card isn't in there, the driver will ignore it.
If it is there, the driver still may look at the "Subsystem" ID and
decide it cannot handle that flavour of the card - unfortunately there
you would need to look into the driver source code to make sure.
The "modinfo" command is something you can run both on SL4 and inside
the rescue CD, just to see the differences.
With the PCI ID, you can the start Googling for which exact version of
the driver added support for your card.. or for other drivers that also
might be able to support this.
best regards
Jan
